At the head of the loop, you call the report() method with a format specifier and the iteration count, and get back a string that should be displayed.

If you include a carriage return character (\r) in the format string, then the message will be over-written at each step. Putting \r at the start of the format string, as in the SYNOPSIS, results in the cursor sitting at the end of the message.

If you display to STDOUT, then remember to enable auto-flushing:

use IO::Handle;
STDOUT->autoflush(1);

The shortest time interval that can be measured is 1 second.

METHODS

new

my $p = Time::Progress->new(%options);

Returns new object of Time::Progress class and starts the timer. It also sets min and max values to 0 and 100, so the next report calls will default to percents range.

You can configure the instance with the following parameters:

min

Sets the min attribute, as described in the attr section below.

max

Sets the max attribute, as described in the attr section below.

smoothing

If set to a true value, then the estimated time remaining is smoothed in a simplistic way: if the time remaining ever goes up, by less than 10% of the previous estimate, then we just stick with the previous estimate. This prevents flickering estimates. By default this feature is turned off.

Parameters can be ommited and then default format set with attr will be used.

Sequences 'L', 'l', 'E' and 'e' can have width also:

%10e
%5l
...

Estimate time calculations can be used only if min and max values are set (see attr method) and current item is passed to report! if you want to use the default format but still have estimates use it like this:

$p->format( undef, 45 );

If you don't give current item (step) or didn't set proper min/max value then all estimate sequences will have value `n/a'.

You can freely mix reports during the same event.

elapsed($item)

Returns the time elapsed, in seconds. This help function, and those described below, take one argument: the current item number.

SEE ALSO

The first thing you need to know about Smart::Comments is that it was written by Damian Conway, so you should expect to be a little bit freaked out by it. It looks for certain format comments in your code, and uses them to display progress messages. Includes support for progress meters.

Progress::Any separates the calculation of stats from the display of those stats, so you can have different back-ends which display progress is different ways. There are a number of separate back-ends on CPAN.

Term::ProgressBar::Quiet uses Term::ProgressBar if your code is running in a terminal. If not running interactively, then no progress bar is shown.

Term::ProgressBar::Simple provides a simple interface where you get a $progress object that you can just increment in a long-running loop. It builds on Term::ProgressBar::Quiet, so displays nothing when not running interactively.

Term::Activity displays a progress meter with timing information, and two different skins.

Text::ProgressBar is another customisable progress meter, which comes with a number of 'widgets' for display progress information in different ways.

ProgressBar::Stack handles the case where a long-running process has a number of sub-processes, and you want to record progress of those too.

String::ProgressBar provides a simple progress bar, which shows progress using a bar of ASCII characters, and the percentage complete.

Term::Spinner is simpler than most of the other modules listed here, as it just displays a 'spinner' to the terminal. This is useful if you just want to show that something is happening, but can't predict how many more operations will be required.

Term::Pulse shows a pulsed progress bar in your terminal, using a child process to pulse the progress bar until your job is complete.